在这17本书里读懂中国Do You Want to Read More About China?

来源：纽约时报 2018-12-28 04:01

Last month, The Times published a five-part seriesabout China’s rising power and reach. Some readers wrote to ask for suggestions of books they could read to dive even deeper into the topic. Here’s a start that’s far from complete.

Hessler’s“Country Driving” is an “exploration of China’s burgeoning highway system, and it definitely contains some epic drives: Mr. Hessler, for example,undertakes a 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall all the way from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau, his rental car packed with a tent and food supplies that willmake your teeth ache: Coca-Cola, Oreo cookies, candy bars, Gatorade.”

The big story here is that China is “a country that’s feverishly on the move,” from “farming and folkways, to new cities and their sprouting factories.”

本书最重要的信息是，中国是一个“马不停蹄向前飞奔的国家”，正在走出“农业和民间传统，进入新城市和工厂如雨后春笋般出现的未来”。

Read our review.

这里是本报发表的书评。

‘Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China,’ by Evan Osnos

《野心时代：在新中国追求财富、真相和信念》(Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China)，欧逸文(Evan Osnos)/著

“Age of Ambition” is a “riveting and troubling portrait of a people in a state of extreme anxiety about their identity, values and future.” In the book, “Osnos paints a China rived by moral crisis and explosive frustration, whose citizens are desperate to achieve wealth, even as they are terrified of being left with nothing. The Communist Party leadership, Osnos writes, is so morally and intellectually bankrupt that only the uneasy bargain to provide ‘prosperity in exchange for loyalty’ allows it to retain a semblance of legitimacy. Even so, ‘the gap between the society’s meritocratic myth and its oligarchic reality was becoming clear and measurable.’”

‘Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China,’ by Philip P. Pan

《走出毛泽东的阴影：为新中国的灵魂而奋斗》(Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for The Soul of a New China)，潘公凯(Philip P. Pan)/著

Pan’s “Out of Mao’s Shadow” assesses the “current state of the world’s most populous nation, looking at both the growing personal freedom its citizens now enjoy and the Communist Party’s continued monopoly on power. He notes that prosperity has raised people’s expectations and access to information, even as it’s helped the government forestall democratization: many citizens who might once have become dissidents have grown increasingly focused on their private lives and the opportunity to make money quickly, while party officials, who ‘can often determine who succeeds and fails in the new capitalist economy,’ wield ‘tremendous leverage over the emerging class of private businessmen and entrepreneurs that might otherwise support political change.’”

“China in Ten Words” is a collection of essays in which Yu Hua “depicts a morally compromised nation, plagued by escalating unemployment, class polarization and endemic corruption and waste. At the extremes, peasants traverse the land selling their blood to the highest bidder while multimillionaires build mansions that are replicas of the White House.”

“In richness, moral urgency and drama, there can be few events of history with greater literary potential than the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Yang Jiang’s ‘Six Chapters from My Life Downunder,’ her slender account of being sent ‘down’ for two years to a re-education school in the countryside, is one of the few memoirs of the period and all the more precious for that.”

“The Corpse Walker” a collection of conversations, is an “industrious, well-crafted recording of oral histories, almost all from the southwestern province of Sichuan. … an area of extremes: mountains and plains, industry and farms, the newly rich and the perpetually poor. Its continuum of orthodoxy slides between animism, Taoism, Maoist atheism and the quasi capitalism of its favorite son, Deng Xiaoping.”

“Kurtz-Phelan’s book, ‘The China Mission,’ tells the story of Marshall’s unsuccessful mission to China. Thoroughly researched and compellingly written, it is at once a revealing study of character and leadership, a vivid reconstruction of a critical episode in the history of the early Cold War and an insightful meditation on the limits of American power even at its peak.”

‘A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman and the Birth of Modern China,’ by Kevin Peraino

《动如脱兔：毛泽东、杜鲁门和1949年现代中国的诞生》(A FORCE SO SWIFT：Mao, Truman and the Birth of Modern China, 1949)，凯文·珀雷诺(Kevin Peraino)著

“Peraino’s absorbing book covers that tipping-point year, 1949, when Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party came to power and things not only changed radically within China, but also for Chinese-American relations. After several decades of close ties to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, including a wartime alliance, the United States plunged first into Cold War with China and then hot war (in Korea), followed by several decades of almost complete diplomatic separation.”

‘A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia,’ by Aaron L. Friedberg

《美国回得了亚洲吗？》(A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia)，罗亚伦(Aaron L. Friedberg)/著

“In ‘A Contest for Supremacy’ Friedberg outlines several reasons a closer relationship between the two powers is possible: economic interdependence, the prospect that China may become more open and democratic, its continuing integration into the international system, common threats like climate change, and nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, he believes two other factors — a growing clash of interests and deep ideological and political differences — will prove more decisive and will make the relationship more tense and competitive.”

Kissinger was not only the first official American emissary to Communist China, he persisted in his brokerage with more than 50 trips over four decades, spanning the careers of seven leaders on each side. Diplomatically speaking, he owns the franchise; and with “On China,” … he reflects on his remarkable run.

“Dikotter’s gripping, horrific and at times sensationalistic ‘The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976,’ the third volume of his work on the Mao years, challenges the Chinese people to address those missing years. Drawn from hundreds of English-language and Chinese eyewitness accounts, newly available archival records, online Cultural Revolution documentary projects and foreign and Chinese scholarship, the book paints … a damning portrait of Mao and Communist Party governance.”

‘Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century,’ by Orville Schell and John Delury

《富强：中国通往21世纪的长征》(Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century)，夏伟(Orville Schell)和鲁乐汉(John Delury)/著

In this book, Schell and Delury “argue that for generations of influential Chinese, shame has been a stimulant.” Their examination of how this “unusual trait in Chinese culture worked its way through politics and intellectual life is a fascinating attempt to reconcile China’s current success with its past suffering. It also sets the stage for perhaps the biggest challenge facing a much wealthier and more powerful China today, since it cannot go on fighting its vanquished ghosts forever.”

‘Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age,’ by Stephen Platt

《帝国的黄昏：鸦片战争及中国最后的黄金时代的终结》The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age 裴士锋(Stephen R. Platt)/著

“Platt has written an enthralling account of the run-up to war between Britain and China during a century in which wealth and power were shifting inexorably from East to West. But if this history holds a lesson today — as wealth and power shift equally inexorably back from West to East — it is surely the same one that Karl Marx identified just a decade after the Opium War, that men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”

‘Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China,’ by Leslie T. Chang

《工厂女孩：在一个变化的中国，从乡村走向城市》(Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China)，张彤禾(Leslie T. Chang)/著

“The emergence of China’s titanic manufacturing base has been chronicled in numerous books and articles in recent years, but Chang has elected to focus not on the broader market forces at play but on the individuals, most of them women, who leave their villages and seek their fortunes on the front lines of this economy.”

In “Leftover Women,” Fincher argues that women in China “are pressed to accept unsuitable marriages while in their mid-20s. The state, alarmed by gender imbalances and the potential for unattached men to create social unrest, has allied with insecure parents to describe them as ‘leftover’ if they delay, she says. The women are systematically deprived of homeownership because of parental and spousal pressure to put real estate in the husband’s name, even if the woman, or her parents, has contributed significantly to the purchase.”

‘One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment,’ by Mei Fong

《独生子女：中国最激进实验的过去与未来》(One Child: The Past and Future of China’s Most Radical Experiment)，方凤美(Mei Fong)/著

“One Child” examines how “the repercussions of population control will continue to reverberate throughout China.” The book’s greatest strength is Fong’s reporting. She “meets Liang Zhongtang, who fruitlessly attempted to dissuade China’s leaders from adopting the policy in the 1980s. She interviews people at adoption agencies that are suspected of seizing second children and selling them to Westerners.” She highlights earthquakes and other natural disasters and shows “how unexpected are the tragedies of China’s population policy.”

‘Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve,’ by Lenora Chu

《小战士 ：一个美国男孩、一所中国学校和一场全球竞赛》(LITTLE SOLDIERS) ，莱诺拉·朱(Lenora Chu)著

“China is such a vast, contradictory land that the most illuminating books often explore it through an intense focus on a single topic … Education is a particularly transparent window, as demonstrated by the perceptive “Little Soldiers,” which turns over cultural rocks from bribery to the urban-rural divide while delving into the nation’s school system, deeply rooted as it is in both ancient Confucianism and Communist dogma.”

There are countless other good books on China. For instance: “Wild Swans,” by Jung Chang; Ian Johnson’s “The Souls of China”; Richard McGregor’s “The Party”; “From Heaven Lake,” by Vikram Seth; Jonathan Spence’s “Mao Zedong” and Peter Hopkirk’s “Trespassers on the Roof of the World.” Let us know in the comments below if you have a favorite.